Stealing Time

Early risers in the US may be laboring under the misapprehension that today’s column posted an hour later than usual, but that would be incorrect. My column posted at exactly the same time it always does (except for some equinoxes & solstices); it’s just that your clock is fast. Now, you may protest that your clock isn’t actually fast because everybody else’s is equally fast, but that simply wouldn’t be true; the fact that everyone agrees that a lie is true doesn’t actually make it true (consider “sex trafficking”). Just because a government demands that we all lie about what time it is from late winter until mid-autumn doesn’t make that lie true; it just creates a shared lie. Now, I’m sure some of y’all are ready to pontificate in the comments about how time is a lie anyway and blah blah blah, so I’ll save you the trouble: no. In the mid-19th century telecommunications and fast travel by railway necessitated timekeeping be standardized instead of judged by the local solar time, and so at first railways and then governments adopted standard times and, soon after that, time zones. “Daylight Saving” or “Summer Time” schemes do nothing but throw that standard off and add complexity to coordinating schedules in different parts of the world; the practice costs the US alone an estimated $434 million per year, so we can assume the world cost is in the tens of billions. And for what? So people who work 9 to 5 jobs (of which there are far fewer than there used to be) can have extra time to spend outdoors, despite the fact that the amount of time people in the industrialized nations who invented and maintain this silly clock-setting game spend less time outdoors than they ever have at any point in recorded history. Good grief. How about we drop the nonsense, and those with flexible schedules just go to work an hour earlier so they have their after-work outdoor time? Companies who want to can even adopt summer hours if they like (as many still do). And that would let people like me, whose pineal glands refuse to settle down until at least 4 to 6 hours after sunset, actually get to sleep sometime before 4 AM. Yes, this is a cantankerous grumble; please feel free to ignore the crazy lady with the big tits and the outlandish opinions, and just keep doing things as the government tells you to whether they make any sense or not.